Commercial aircraft may include structures mounted into openings in the aircraft (e.g., openings in an aircraft exterior), such as fuselage-mounted structures. For example, a fuselage-mounted packboard compartment used to stow an inflatable evacuation slide may be mounted into a fuselage opening. Other fuselage-mounted structures include, for example, panels and compartments of various thicknesses used to form the aircraft skin. Such fuselage-mounted structures benefit from being securely mounted using a low weight device, while tending to reduce wear and abrasion of an aircraft mounting surface.
The mounting of fuselage-mounted structures comprised of composite material is particularly challenging because the composite material is susceptible to damage caused by the crushing force of conventional load-bearing fasteners and the ability to fabricate sustainable threads and grooves into the composite material has been elusive. Other conventional methods for mounting the structures to the aircraft exterior including the fuselage have involved adding mass to build the structures themselves, at the expense of additional weight, and then mounting the built structure directly to the aircraft exterior, but such an arrangement undesirably places load bearing forces load directly on the structure itself.